Dist. 108 dips into reserves

Michael Smothers

Thursday

Sep 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMSep 29, 2011 at 4:20 AM

Pekin’s public grade-school district will have to dip into its savings to pay its bills this fiscal year.

The district simply will receive less from the state in general aid, corporate taxes and reimbursement for transportation costs, administrators told the District 108 Board of Trustees at its meeting Monday night.

Pekin’s public grade-school district will have to dip into its savings to pay its bills this fiscal year.

The district simply will receive less from the state in general aid, corporate taxes and reimbursement for transportation costs, administrators told the District 108 Board of Trustees at its meeting Monday night.

City homeowners, meanwhile, will pay District 108 property taxes based on a tax rate 18 cents higher than last year’s rate. That, however, doesn’t mean they all will pay more taxes to the district, business manager Glayn Worrell said Tuesday.

The flat growth of total equalized assessed valuation of property within the district, measured by the latest quadrennial assessment, played a major role in producing the latest tax rate of $2.83 per $100 assessed valuation, Worrell said.

As a whole, “Some tax bills will go up and some will go down,” depending on whether a property’s value increased or decreased in the latest assessment, he said.

The board Monday night approved a budget for fiscal year 2012, which began July 1, that will require it to fill a total $1.16 million reduction in three categories of state funding with funds from its $6.5 million in reserves, said Superintendent Bill Link.

The largest cut from last year is in transportation funding, he said. It will amount to $500,000 “less than we should receive,” he said, as the result of funding reductions that Gov. Pat Quinn has said the overall budget produced by the General Assembly has forced him to make.

That amounts to a 43 percent cut in funding to provide school bus service from the previous fiscal year, Link said.

“There’s been talk of the General Assembly restoring the transportation cuts, but nothing’s certain,” he said.

Like other districts statewide, District 108 also will see a 4.5 percent reduction in its general state aid to $7.96 million. That’s $332,000 less than it received in FY11, he said.

The struggles private businesses and corporations in the state have recently endured also will produce $330,000 less in corporate personal property replacement tax funds than the district received last year, Link said. That amount of $3.83 million was $630,000 more than the district had expected.

The fluctuations “can translate into how well the economy is doing,” Worrell said.

While Link said the use of reserves to offset the income reductions will save the district from any program or staffing reductions this fiscal year, it’s a short-term solution.

“There will be no cuts this year, but if things don’t improve we’ll have to look at ways to adapt,” he said. “It will always be things before people — equipment, supplies before programs.”

The board also learned Monday that the district’s student population this year will be 3,712, an increase of 26 students over last year.

Levy info

District 108’s next levy is increasing by about $750,000 over last year’s amount.